I had always thought I do this because some other word that I type a lot has the letters in that order. For example, you say you keep typing lenght. Well, once you fix that, will you start typing ligth instead of light? (Or any of the many words that are ght. It's a common combination in English.)
Ask HN: Does anyone else press keys in wrong order for certain words everytime?
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else press keys in wrong order for certain words everytime?
#12I’m convinced this is a result of typing on a keyboard - it seldom happens when I’m writing.
I think that after a typing for a while, your brain tries to introduce some optimization, i.e. while your one finger goes for the letter ‘t’ (my left hand), your brain queues up the letter ‘h’ for another finger on your other hand. Quite often, and possibly because I’m right hand dominant, the hand going for the letter ‘h’ gets there first. It usually happens with the same pairs of letters.
It would not surprise me if keyboards have introduced whole new kinds of dyslexia.
I have noticed this has crept into my writing occasionally - if I have been typing a lot - usually with the same pairs of letters. I will write the second one first, and then go back and insert the first one.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else press keys in wrong order for certain words everytime?
#13I still type badly after years of practice and trying to touch type. I just hit wrong keys quite often! I’ve quit caring.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else press keys in wrong order for certain words everytime?
#14I had always thought I do this because some other word that I type a lot has the letters in that order. For example, you say you keep typing lenght . Well, once you fix that, will you start typing ligth instead of light ? (Or any of the many words that are ght . It's a common combination in English.)
Wow, that's an interesting hypothesis! I just pulled up a random wordlist on GitHub (370k words) [1]. Searching it in a text editor, "ght" appears 1621 times and "gth" only appears 77 times! So perhaps habitual mistakes like these really are caused by the higher frequency of a different ordering of the same letters.
[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dwyl/english-words/master/...
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else press keys in wrong order for certain words everytime?
#15yes,I frequently make typo while typing word ending with -re,to -er. I know the spelling. Still I make those errors and then correct those errors immediately.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else press keys in wrong order for certain words everytime?
#16a good , fluid mechanical keyboard makes one more accurate. anything deviating from perfection will introduce errors though.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else press keys in wrong order for certain words everytime?
#17I type "grpe" instead of "grep" all the time.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else press keys in wrong order for certain words everytime?
#18"langauge". And I'm a linguist, so I type this word a lot...
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else press keys in wrong order for certain words everytime?
#19yes, gti instead git... i even kept an
alias gti=git alias g=git